Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Standards and backbone

By Peter Berger

Published 11:38 am, Monday, April 3, 2017

Imagine you’ve traveled back through time to your family doctor’s days in medical school. Anatomy’s got him baffled, and he can’t keep his symptoms straight. “Whoops!” he exclaims as his instructor relieves him of his scalpel.

On graduation day his classmates receive their medical degrees because they’ve passed the tests and met the standards. Your physician’s diploma reads the same as everybody else’s, but his medical school adjusted its standards for him. He just had to learn general terms like “leg” and how to apply Band-Aids.

Chilling, isn’t it.

Fortunately, your journey through time was a bad dream. Your physician’s diploma means he proved himself competent by meeting a set of real standards. It didn’t matter how nice he was, how hard he tried, or how much he wanted to be a physician. If he couldn’t learn real doctor stuff, he didn’t get a paper that said he was a real doctor.

Public school officials talk about standards, but too often they’re the standards of our nightmare medical school. They have no backbone.

Grades, whether they’re traditional A’s or allegedly cutting-edge “standards-based” 4’s, need to compare each student’s work to the skill and content norms established and expected at his grade level. Those norms, or standards, need to be consistent. Otherwise we couldn’t tell the difference between an eighth grader who gets an A on basic adding and subtracting and a student who gets an A on regular eighth grade math.

Anyone who’s been to school knows that some teachers are “easier” graders. Standards-based disciples claim their system eliminates this subjectivity and grade-inflation. The truth is standards-based grading is just as subjective as traditional grading. It just uses more words and rubrics to make it seem objective.

When I grade papers, I think about the thirty years of middle school students I’ve taught. I think about the work this year’s students are handing in. I think about what I knew when I was in eighth grade and what students today should know. Sometimes I ask colleagues for a second opinion.

I turn somersaults encouraging students. I tell those who didn’t work hard to learn a lesson and work harder. I tell others who did work hard but still didn’t do well how I felt when my assignments came back with lousy grades. I tell them to ask for help and to let me read their rough drafts next time. I remind the ones who worked like crazy on a project the last weekend that they had four weeks to complete it. I explain to students who didn’t follow directions that you can’t get much credit for doing the wrong thing.

I tell them it would be a lot easier to just give everybody A’s, except it wouldn’t be honest. Then I reassure them that when they’re holding their grandchildren on their laps, they probably won’t remember the grade they got on their Fort Ticonderoga report.

But no matter how many pep talks I give, some students won’t work hard enough. Others, no matter how hard they work, won’t be able to meet the grade level standards I need to maintain.

The experts and politicians are lying. All students won’t succeed. There is no magic method for teaching every student everything we want students to know.

They may all be able to learn something. But they won’t all be able to learn enough to pass seventh grade geography, eighth grade science, or sophomore English.

There’s no shame in this for students who do their best.

The shame lies in how we mask the truth.

Some students who can’t handle grade level work receive instruction in alternative settings. As a teaching strategy this makes sense. It’s better to teach them material they can understand than subject them to hours of pointless instruction that’s beyond them. Other “unsuccessful” students, both those who can’t do grade level work and those who won’t, remain “included” in regular classrooms, except they’re required to read less, write less, and know less. In both scenarios, their grades are based on material and work that don’t meet grade level standards. That way nobody gets F’s.

Some schools use code words like “adapted” and “independent program” to denote these inflated grades. The trouble is most people and parents don’t know what the code words mean.

Some educators even object to using the code words. They don’t think the record should reflect that Johnny’s B would’ve been an F if he’d had to meet the real requirements.

Kind of like your nightmare doctor’s diploma.

It isn’t a standard if it only counts for the students who meet it.

I appreciate students who work hard, and those I enjoy teaching the most aren’t always the brightest in the class. But if a student knows history cold, I can’t give him a low grade just because it comes easily to him. In the same way, if he doesn’t know history, I can’t give him a passing grade just because he’s trying his best.

Everybody’s clamoring for higher standards. Officials stand up at meetings and declare that their school has them. But watch what happens to teachers when students get F’s or standards-based 1’s.

“What are you doing wrong?” we’re asked.

My answer is simple. I’m upholding the standards that you say we have.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.